Virginia Heffernan is a speaker, author and top-line futurist who advises creators in both industry and the arts.

Virginia Heffernan works with some of the world's greatest technology companies to build the brand narratives that attract talent and customers, and create real growth. Working with companies like PayPal and Earnest, and major venture firms in San Francisco and New York, she is a top-line futurist and the secret weapon to bringing a company to life using narrative, mission, vision, lexicon, manifesto and ingenious content marketing. Called "a new kind of wizard," by WIRED co-founder Kevin Kelly, Heffernan, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard, is the author of MAGIC AND LOSS: The Internet as Art, which courageously scales up our vision of the Internet and its potential—and won raves in Silicon Valley for determining a vast new landscape of digital opportunity. She writes on digital culture for Fast Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO, and many other places, and she appears on Bloomberg TV, CNBC, MSNBC, PBS and NPR.

What I like to talk about.

Your talk was fabulous: the perfect blend of engaging, smart observation and provocation that one prays for at the beginning of a conference. Everyone was quoting you. People who came late and didn’t make it to the talk were plainly jealous of their colleagues who did. I owe you big time for getting our conference off to a terrific start with ideas that kept us fueled until the end.

Staying HumanHow to Connect with Customers Online

By showing how digital and hybrid companies can furnish their users and customers with the stress-relief, delight and inspiration they need, I offer concrete solutions to how to connect with customers, cultivate them, and build brands they love.

Magic and LossThe Internet as Art

In this entertaining, accessible, and thoughtful talk, I present an original and far-reaching analysis of what the Internet is and does. I show how the Internet is much more than a new technology or new business, but a ubiquitous yet seldom examined world that is profoundly changing the way we live.

The InternetUnderstanding the Medium for Businesses

Many companies underestimate how immersive and robust Internet culture is. They fail to recalibrate their messages for an online world that is rapidly displacing traditional media as the hub of conversation, content viewing, shopping. In this talk, I show businesses how to capitalize on the intrinsic (and limitless) possibilities of the Internet. What are the important distinctions between the Internet and, say, television or print? How do Internet users think, behave, search, watch and consume? Plain spoken and lively, I offer corporate audiences—product sellers, service providers, content producers—an abundance of insight and real-world examples. The Internet is not just a reformation of stuff found in the real world. The Internet is its own world, with its own rules of engagement, its own expectations. It’s a force to be reckoned with—and profited from.